ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
had to be moved temporarily; thus in total there were 110 safety programmes developed. It was a massive project.” Andy Fairless explained that the Trust’s Jake Marshall undertook the majority of the more straightforward cable isolations, while he carried out more complex isolations.
Some panel replacements took four hours
He said: “Taking one cable off the ‘old’ switchboard and connecting it to the new one could take anything up to four hours. In some cases, we had to move cabling from the old switchboard to a new one, and from there, subsequently, to another one. The switchboard replacement was so complex for a number of reasons – including all the co-ordination, and the fact that the existing unit hadn’t been comprehensively serviced for a while. Some of the cables were so large that you couldn’t move them until you got the switchboard out of the way. We effectively had to pull the cables out, and join them in a box, to allow us to remove the old switchboard. This alone was challenging.”
The existing switchboard was replaced with three modular units. Andy Fairless said of the limited access to the switchroom: “There is walk-in access, but with courtyards around the surrounding
buildings, you couldn’t, for instance, get a Hiab to unload or offload, which meant a lot of hand manoeuvring equipment down corridors.” Underneath the old switchboard was an access ‘pit’, some 1,200 mm deep, containing extensive overlapping cabling. He said: “It took a lot of work to identify where the cables went. Some of the core cables we had to switch had a diameter of up to 240 mm, and, due to their sheer size, are not the easiest to work on, especially within the confines of a shallow pit.” All the switchboards were ‘bottom entry’, with all the cabling underneath. He said: “There was a chequer plate on the switchroom floor
which we had to remove to afford access, but we then needed to get two or three people into the space below to get the cables to move. All the cables are live. Although they incorporate armour protection, you still have to be really careful when you are in that space; hence all the time taken to ensure we did it right and safely.”
Cable identification exercise Prior to the cable switchover starting, team members had undertaken a cable identification exercise. Andy Fairless elaborated on this: “This entailed identifying every switch on the
The new transformer installation in the Leazes Wing.
August 2020 Health Estate Journal 33
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